Apple continued its seemingly unstoppable stellar financial results over the last three months, pulling in nearly as much revenue in those three months as Google does in a year.

The Cupertino hardware and software giant is on the march to become the world’s most valuable company. It exceeded analyst’s expectations for this quarter as the iPhone sales were up 142 percent year over year. Meanwhile, the continuing popularity of the iPad also contributed to Apple making a profit of $7.3 billion on revenues of $28.6 billion for the third quarter of its fiscal year, which ended on June 25.

The company’s gross margins — the difference between what it costs them to make an item versus what they sell it for, rose to 41.7 percent, versus 39.1 percent in the same quarter last year.

In a conference call with analysts, Apple COO Tim Cook said the company was doing well thanks to insatiable demand for the iPad 2 and growing enterprise and international sales. The latter now accounts for 62 percent of Apple’s revenue.

“We sold every iPad 2 we could make,” Cook said.

Apple sold more than 20 million iPhones, 9.25 million iPads, 7.54 million iPods and 3.95 million Macs over the last three months. The only decline was in the sales of iPods, which the company attributed to the growing popularity of smartphones as a replacement for dedicated digital music players.

Cook said that the iPad wasn’t likely to face much competition from Android-powered tablets, citing the iPad’s lead in apps designed especially for a tablet-sized device.

“You would be hard-pressed to find more than a few hundred on other platforms,” Cook said. “It also appears that other tablets aren’t getting any traction.”

As for Apple’s recent patent war against Android-phone manufacturers HTC, Samsung and Motorola, — actions that include enforcing patents dating back to the mid-1990s, Cook stuck to the party line.

“We love competition, but we want people to invent their own stuff, and we are going to make sure we defend our intellectual property,” Cook said.

Apple’s stock barely budged on the news, perhaps in part because Apple advised analysts that the company’s revenues would likely fall to about $25 billion next quarter, with lower earnings as well.

Photo: Apple computers and money go together well. (Ben Chau)