Technology giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said early Tuesday in South Korea that it expects to earn 15.1 trillion won ($14 billion) in fourth-quarter operating profits when it reports final results later this month, setting a new record for quarterly profits for the third successive quarter.

But those preliminary results still fell short of analysts’ expectations as memory chip price hikes eased and the won rose relative to the dollar. Samsung also said it expects to gross 66 trillion won in revenue. Analysts polled by Bloomberg were expecting an operating profit of 16.1 trillion won on 67.6 trillion won in revenue.

Investors didn’t take the news so well, driving down Samsung’s share price by 1.6 percent in early trading.

Samsung’s profits were reportedly hit by a leveling off in prices for memory chips, which are its biggest earner and the main driving force behind its record earnings in the past two quarters, Bloomberg said. The company was also hit by a rise of around 7 percent in the won against the U.S. dollar, which eroded the value of its overseas profits. However, these losses were offset somewhat by increased demand for organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, screens.

Samsung will have ended 2017 with an operating profit of 53.6 trillion won, also a new record. The firm’s memory chip business is said to have contributed 35 trillion won to that total. In comparison, Samsung’s operating profit for the whole of 2016 was just 35 trillion won.

Overall, it was a good quarter for Samsung despite missing out on analysts’ targets, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc.

“Yes, they missed targets but not by much,” Mueller said. “Samsung is sitting pretty in its double role as smartphone provider and components supplier. This is a remarkable sign of its resilience and core business strength.”

The company will break out divisional performance later this month along with final results.

Samsung’s cash cow in 2017 has been its memory chip business, with prices for 32-gigabyte DRAM server modules nearly doubling in the last year because of limited supply. Prices for 64GB MLC NAND flash memory chips also rose by 55 percent in the last year, Bloomberg reported.

Samsung will likely struggle to replicate this year’s success with its memory chip business, however. Although high demand is likely to continue into 2018, Samsung and its main rivals Toshiba Corp. and SK Hynix Inc. are all set to step up production capacity this year in a move that analysts believe will erode prices. Samsung is also investing 30 trillion won in its Pyeongtaek-based memory chip production line, further increasing its capacity, Reuters reported.

As for its other main businesses, Samsung is set to debut its latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S9, next month at the Mobile World Congress conference. The company is also looking to release a smartphone with a bendable display later this year, in an effort to thwart the challenge posed by the likes of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and other rivals to its mobile dominance.

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