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The study of quasianalytic contractions, motivated by the hyperinvariant subspace problem, is continued. Special emphasis is put on the case when the contraction is asymptotically cyclic. New properties of the functional commutant are explored. Analytic contractions and bilateral weighted shifts are discussed as illuminating examples.

Using the Sz.-Nagy-Foias functional model it was shown in [L. Kérchy, Injection of unilateral shifts into contractions with non-vanishing unitary asymptotes, Acta Sci. Math. (Szeged) 61 (1995) 443-476] that under certain conditions on a contraction T the natural embedding of a Hardy space of vector-valued functions into the corresponding L 2 space can be factored into the product of two transformations, intertwining T with a unilateral shift and with an absolutely continuous unitary operator, respectively. The norm estimates in the Factorization Theorem of this paper are sharpened to their best possible form by essential improvements in the proof. As a consequence we obtain that if the residual set of a contraction covers the whole unit circle then those invariant subspaces, where the restriction is similar to the unilateral shift with a similarity constant arbitrarily close to 1, span the whole space. Furthermore, the hyperinvariant subspace problem for asymptotically non-vanishing contractions is reduced to these special circumstances.

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