Agere Systems Inc., the spinoff of Lucent Technologies Inc.'s (NYSE: LU) microelectronics division, is planning to raise as much as $8.5 billion dollars in its IPO.

That would make it one of the largest IPOs of all time, just shy of AT&T Wireless (NYSE: AWE), which raised $9 billion in April of last year.

In an updated registration statement filed yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company stated that it plans to sell upwards of 370 million shares of stock in a price range of $15 to $20. The company would raise $5.5 billion at the lower end of that range and $7.4 billion at the top end of the range. But the investment bankers, led by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, left room to boost the price upwards, filing for a maximum IPO size of $8.5 billion.

According to the filing, Lucent would hold on to 72.3 percent of the shares of Agere and would control 91.2 percent of the voting rights. Lucent officials have said they plan to distribute Agere shares to shareholders in late 2001.

Lucent executives are hoping the spinoff of Agere will help boost the value of Lucent stock. Many analysts believe the market had discounted the value of Agere within Lucent (see Analysts to Investors: "Buy Lucent" ).

Agere sells a large number of components for the communications industry, including integrated circuits and optoelectronics components such as lasers and integrated DWDM (dense wavelength-division multiplexing) modules. For the year ending Sept. 30, 2000, the company reported $4.7 billion in revenue and a loss of $76 million.

Agere had filed a preliminary prospectus in December (see Lucent's Agere Files for IPO), but that filing included few details and pegged the IPO at a token amount of $100 million.

-- R. Scott Raynovich, executive editor, Light Reading http://www.lightreading.com