Understand any stock in simple English
Enter a ticker to learn what the company does and how it makes money.
Golar LNG turns natural gas into a liquid and rents out giant floating ships that chill, store, and regasify it for energy companies.
Golar LNG owns and operates floating liquefied natural gas vessels, which are essentially giant ships that turn natural gas into a super-chilled liquid so it can be shipped across oceans, then turn it back into gas at the other end. The company makes money two main ways today: it operates a floating LNG production vessel called the Hilli, which is hired under a long-term contract by oil major Perenco off the coast of Cameroon, and it has a second, much larger vessel called Gimi that started production off Mauritania and Senegal in 2024. Golar also owns a big stake in a company called NFE, and it collects steady fees from customers who lock in multi-year contracts. Think of it as a landlord, but the "building" is a 1,000-foot ship that turns gas into liquid and back again, and the "rent" is paid by energy companies that would otherwise have no way to sell their gas.
The key driver of Golar's business is the fact that a huge amount of natural gas around the world is trapped in places where building a giant onshore LNG plant is too expensive, too slow, or politically impossible. A floating LNG vessel can sail to that gas field, park there for 15 or 20 years, and produce LNG right on the water. Golar was early to this idea, starting as a shipping company decades ago and then pivoting hard into floating production. Its free cash flow mostly goes toward paying down debt, funding new vessel conversions, and returning cash to shareholders through dividends and buybacks — the company has bought back a meaningful chunk of its shares in recent years. Revenue is lumpy because it depends on a small number of very large, long-term contracts rather than selling lots of small things.
The big recent story is the Gimi vessel, which represents a step up in scale and is the company's main growth engine for the next several years. Golar's fortunes rise and fall with global natural gas prices, the pace of new gas field developments, and whether its customers keep paying on schedule — a risk that has shown up before when a major customer ran into trouble. If you like businesses where a handful of enormous, hard-to-copy assets generate decades of predictable fees, Golar is a clean example. If you worry about customer concentration and commodity cycles, it is also a clean example of that.
Saved answer · last researched 11 Oct 2026