Advice on Cloning a Site

Background:

I work for a company that operates a domestic (Chinese) site and an export (outside of China) division. For many (good) reasons, the two divisions operate under different names and have different domain names to match. The two divisions, and their domains, must remain separate–even if they both sell the same products.

The Question:

I’m currently building a completely new version of the Export site, using WP (4.2.2), writing content for good SEO, better information, etc.

Eventually, we’ll want to rebuild the Domestic site, also. I’m thinking of cloning Export into Domestic, doing a S/R to change the company name (different names for different markets), and using that as the English version of the Domestic site. Then our Chinese staff could translate to Chinese and tweak SEO stuff to be more Baidu-friendly (the Chinese Google).

I’d be interested in hearing people’s advice on whether that’s a smart way to go or not. What problems might it cause? Duplicate content isn’t an issue because of the separation between Chinese and Foreign internets.