Mcdonald's (document en anglais)

McDonald's Corp. MCD -0.79% runs 105 drive-throughs in China and is planning to build 300 more in the next three years to satisfy the new appetite for grab-and-go meals. "The rapidly growing car industry in China augurs well for McDonald's," said Kenneth Chan, chief executive of McDonald's China.

In an effort to spread wealth beyond China's big cities, China's central government has promoted the construction of more than 30,000 miles of expressways in the past decade. With its auto sales up 46% to 13.6 million vehicles last year, China is expected to have more than 200 million cars on roads by 2020, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

That, in turn, has sparked changes akin to those spurred by the U.S. Interstate Highway System, which economists generally credit with lowering distribution costs, increasing manufacturing employment and boosting productivity. Business models that revved up in the U.S. a half-century ago to profit from newly motorized consumers now are finding their way to China.

The growth in car use has its costs, of course, such as polluted skies and road congestion. But it has brought gains to companies capitalizing on China's new car culture.

The obvious winners are auto makers like General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co., which rebounded from last year's lackluster U.S. market in part by turning their focus to China, now the largest car market in the world. But the new mobility also means more consumers are staying in hotels, buying goods at suburban stores and listening to the radio while driving in their cars.

As middle class Chinese move out of cities, they are changing the economics of the retail sector. Consumers who once made several trips to a store each week because of limited space for purchases on their bicycle s are shopping less frequently but putting more goods in the shopping cart thanks to roads and cars.

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