(Reuters) - Merck & Co (MRK.N) plans to slash thousands more jobs by late 2015 to wring out an additional $1.5 billion in annual cost savings.

The No. 2 U.S. drugmaker said on Friday it would reduce its workforce by an additional 12 to 13 percent, compared with the 100,000 employees it had at the end of 2009.

But Merck, which is streamlining operations following its $41 billion purchase of Schering Plough Corp in 2009, could not project the actual number of job cuts because they will be offset by new hires in strategic growth areas of its business, such as emerging markets.

"It's hard to know what the (job count) will be in 2015," a company spokesman said, but stressed that the overall impact of the job-cut initiative will be major cost savings, some of which could be plowed back into research and to forge deals with other drugmakers.

The company had 91,000 employees on June 30, after having eliminated almost 12,500 positions in 2010. But it hired about 6,000 employees the same year.

"I think we're going to see other firms continue to expand their cost-reduction programs," Morningstar analyst Damien Conover said, pointing to increasingly difficult reimbursement environments in Europe and the United States.

"We have to remember that 10 years ago these firms were extremely bloated and in an entirely different operating mold, and it's really shifted to one where you don't need the gigantic sales forces that you once needed," Conover said.

Merck, unlike many of its rivals, has vowed to maintain research and development spending at stable levels, rather than slash research costs in order to meet earnings targets. But the company on Friday shaved the high end of its 2011 research budget by $100 million, to between $8 billion and $8.3 billion.

With the new job cuts, the restructuring program will yield annual savings of $4 billion to $4.6 billion by the end of 2015, compared with an earlier estimate of $2.7 billion to $3.1 billion by late 2012, Merck said.

Merck reported a second-quarter profit in line with Wall Street expectations on Friday, helped by big tax gains. But sales handily outpaced forecasts.

It earned $2.02 billion, or 65 cents per share, compared with $752 million, or 24 cents per share, in the year-earlier second quarter, when it took a big restructuring charge for the Schering Plough acquisition.

Excluding special items, Merck earned 95 cents per share, matching the average forecast among analysts polled by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Merck shares were down 1.2 percent at $34.50 in premarket trading.

(Reporting by Ransdell Pierson and Lewis Krauskopf; Editing by Derek Caney)

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