H. Lawrence Culp Jr., General Electric’s new chief executive, faces two major tasks.

Mr. Culp must fix G.E.’s big yet ailing power-generation business, a turnaround project that will take a few years. More immediately, he needs to sell assets and trim costs to generate enough cash to stabilize the company as a whole.

The fourth-quarter results that G.E. reported on Thursday pointed to the depth of those challenges, despite a strong performance by the company’s jet engine business.

Mr. Culp, who became chief executive in October, made a guardedly optimistic case for how G.E. can whittle down its $121 billion debt while improving the profitability of its industrial operations.

Still, G.E. made no forecast for what its profits and revenue would look like this year, saying those would come later. In a conference call, Mr. Culp acknowledged that 2019 was “still very much a work in progress.”

Assets will be sold, but not at steep discounts just to raise cash in a hurry, Mr. Culp said. He went out of his way to deny a Wall Street rumor that the company’s aircraft-leasing unit, GE Capital Aviation Services, Gcas, was for sale.

“To be clear,” he said, “we have no plans to sell Gcas.”

Mr. Culp and Jamie S. Miller, G.E.’s chief financial officer, laid out the company’s plans for cutting its debt by nearly $50 billion by selling parts of, or the remaining stakes in, its rail locomotive, oil field equipment, and health care businesses. All three steps had been announced before, but on Thursday Mr. Culp and Ms. Miller put them more explicitly in the context of G.E.’s overall strategy.

Investors seemed reassured by the results and by the leaders’ comments. G.E. shares, which lost half their value in 2018, were up more than 11 percent in midday trading.

G.E. presented “an honest assessment of the problems and a realistic plan to fix them,” said Scott Davis, chief executive of Melius Research, an independent financial analysis firm.

The company reported operating profit of 17 cents a share for the quarter, a 60 percent decline from the fourth quarter a year earlier. That was below analysts’ average estimate of 22 cents a share, as compiled by IBES Refinitiv, a research firm. Revenue for the quarter was $33.3 billion, above the Wall Street consensus of $32.6 billion.

“There were no new negative surprises,” said Deane Dray, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “That’s really important for G.E. at this stage.”

G.E.’s large and once-lucrative power business lost $872 million in the quarter as its revenue fell 25 percent, to $6.8 billion. By contrast, the jet engine division, which benefited from brisk sales to Boeing and Airbus, reported a 24 percent increase in profit, to $1.7 billion; the unit’s revenue rose 21 percent, to $8.5 billion.

Mr. Culp, known as an expert operating executive during his 14 years leading Danaher, a smaller industrial company, succeeded John Flannery, who was pushed out of G.E.’s top job after a little more than a year.

Within weeks, Mr. Culp had sharply written down the value of G.E.’s power division with a $22 billion good-will charge. The move reflected a recognition that the company had overpaid in acquiring the energy assets of France’s Alstom and had badly misjudged the slowdown in demand for electrical power equipment.

Mr. Culp also slashed G.E’s quarterly dividend to 1 cent a share from 12 cents a share, a decision that will save the company $4 billion a year in cash. In December, G.E. said it would sell a portion of its industrial software unit, GE Digital, and spin off the rest.

In announcing its fourth-quarter results, G.E. also said it had reached an agreement in principle with the Justice Department to settle a long-running investigation into WMC, a subprime mortgage lender that G.E. shut down years ago. The company agreed to pay a civil penalty of $1.5 billion, in line with what it had set aside to pay for the liability.

G.E. still faces other government inquiries. Last year, it set aside reserves of $15 billion to pay for the higher-than-expected cost of reinsuring long-term care policies in its finance arm, GE Capital. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating its miscalculation and accounting in that unit.

G.E. has also disclosed that the commission is investigating its big write-down in the power business and how that business accounted for service contracts. In October, G.E. said the Justice Department is also probing its accounting in the power unit and for the insurance obligations.

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