The classical Banach space $L_1(L_p)$ consists of measurable scalar functions f on the unit square for which

We show that $L_1(L_p) (1 < p < \infty )$ is primary, meaning that whenever $L_1(L_p) = E\oplus F$ , where E and F are closed subspaces of $L_1(L_p)$ , then either E or F is isomorphic to $L_1(L_p)$ . More generally, we show that $L_1(X)$ is primary for a large class of rearrangement-invariant Banach function spaces.

In this paper we consider the following problem: let Xk, be a Banach space with a normalised basis (e(k, j))j, whose biorthogonals are denoted by ${(e_{(k,j)}^*)_j}$ , for $k\in\N$ , let $Z=\ell^\infty(X_k:k\kin\N)$ be their l∞-sum, and let $T:Z\to Z$ be a bounded linear operator with a large diagonal, i.e.,

Under which condition does the identity on Z factor through T? The purpose of this paper is to formulate general conditions for which the answer is positive.