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The US is losing one of its few black leaders at the top of a major American company.

Merck & Co's chief executive Kenneth Frazier is retiring at the end of June, the drugs company said.

The firm said he would be replaced by current chief financial officer Robert Davis, who joined the firm in 2014.

Mr Frazier, the grandson of a sharecropper, is known as a leader in the US business community on racial issues.

In 2017, he was the first business leader to leave former US President Donald Trump's manufacturing council, after Mr Trump failed to condemn a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Last year, he spoke out after the death of George Floyd in police custody.

"What the African American community sees in that videotape is that this African American man, who could be me or any other African American man, is being treated as less than human," he told business broadcaster CNBC.

Mr Frazier is one of just four black executives leading a Fortune 500 company in the US.

The 66-year-old, who trained as a lawyer at Harvard, joined pharmaceutical giant Merck in 1992 and took over as chief executive in 2011.

During his tenure, he has worked on issues such as government claims against the company about its arthritis painkiller Vioxx and its acquisition of another firm which owned Keytruda, a cancer therapy that is now one of Merck's best-selling products.

He will serve as executive chairman of the firm's board during a transition period, the company said.

"His shoes won't be easy to fill in so many ways, both within Merck, but also including his many principled and valuable contributions to important issues facing society today," Mr Davis said on a conference call on Thursday held to discuss the firm's quarterly financial results.

Mr Frazier was originally set to retire in 2019, but stayed on after Merck changed its policy requiring retirement at the age of 65.