WHITEHOUSE STATION, N.J. - The new Merck & Co. becomes the world's second-biggest drugmaker overnight, and it's boasting a fat wallet to fund future deals.

And, the day after the maker of vaccines and cholesterol and diabetes drugs bought Schering-Plough Corp., the newly combined company announced plans to make Montgomery County a locus of some of its operations.

Merck, which bought Schering-Plough yesterday for $41.1 billion, already employs about 12,000 people in Montgomery County.

With the purchase, it leapfrogged from No. 8 to No. 2 in the industry by revenue.

The company has about $8 billion in cash and investments and plans to keep investing in deals for rights to new drugs.

The corporate headquarters will remain in Whitehouse Station, where Merck already was based. Today, Merck said its U.S. organization for the Global Human Health Division and Merck Research Laboratories would be headquartered in Upper Gwynedd, Montgomery County.

Merck says combining the companies - and slimming down the resulting staff of 106,000 employees - will save about $3.5 billion a year after 2011. But it expects the acquisition to boost profits slightly by next year and is forecasting profit growth in the high single digits for the next several years.