A man walks past the logo of Samsung Electronics outside the Samsung building in Seoul, South Korea.

Samsung Electronics said Friday that profits for the three months that ended June more than halved from a year earlier following continued weakness in the price and demand of memory chips.

The world's largest smartphone maker and supplier of memory chips said operating profit was at 6.5 trillion Korean won ($5.5 billion), which was slightly better than an industry estimate of 6 trillion won, but was down about 56% from a year earlier.

Memory components, which are used in mobile handsets and enterprise servers, comprise Samsung's main profit-making business.

"Results were actually somewhat better than market expectations, but then there is some one-off that the company is talking about," said Sanjeev Rana, senior analyst at CLSA.

Samsung said it saw one-off gains in the display business that were reflected in operating profits. Reuters reported that analysts said the smartphone giant received reimbursements worth about 800 billion won for display panels sold to Apple as the iPhone maker missed a sales target on which the two companies had agreed.

"If you exclude that one-off, actually, it seems that apart from the semiconductor business, which did somewhat better than market expectations, we believe smartphone business performance was ... worse than expected," Rana told CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Friday.

Samsung shares were down 1.2% in afternoon trade, trailing the South Korean benchmark index, which traded near flat.

Experts have said that the entire semiconductor sector is undergoing a period of inventory adjustment, which is keeping demand low and causing a supply glut that's squeezing the price. Some have predicted continued excess inventories in both DRAM and NAND memory chips, which would push back the sector's recovery to the second half of 2020.

DRAM chips allow computers, phones and tablets to run multiple applications at the same time whereas NAND chips function as primary storage.

Final figures for the quarter are due later this month.