One portal
One HQ domain. Businesses as sections or secondary nav. Fits weak brands, buyers who know the group first, and a central team. If HQ is the bidding entity, this is easiest to verify.
Groups either want one site for every business, or a brand-new look per subsidiary. Both can be right. It depends on who buyers search, which chop is on the contract, and whether brands may send traffic to each other.
Fully separate sites
Each brand has its own domain and look. Fits different audiences, wide price bands, or the need to isolate reputation. Highest upkeep, and the story drifts easiest.
Portal + subsites
The group portal covers people, finance, news, investors. Brand subdomains cover products and inquiries. Shared design language, separate content models. Most mid-size groups land here.
Diligence is picky. Evaluators search the winning entity’s name. A group site with no subsidiary line or address still costs points. See What a Website Does in Tenders and Due Diligence. If hiring splits by brand culture, the portal must click through. See A Strong Website Also Makes Hiring and Franchising Easier.
Technically, separate sites do not mean two full CMS stacks. One CMS, different themes and permissions. Marketing can change news without five logins. Staffing: If Nobody Updates It, Is a Website Still Worth Building. Cost rises with site count. See cost and timeline.
Do not stack ten unlabeled business doors to look large. Visitors still need to know which door in five seconds. Leads still land on a specific product site. See inquiry engine.
List legal entities before you argue about pretty nav
Group sites fail when an “ecosystem map” is drawn and nobody can say which license a circle is, which chop, which name buyers search. A four-column table — entity, brand, domain, owner — collapses the architecture choice. Two brands for different buyers (industrial vs consumer) jammed in one product nav hurt both inquiry qualities. Regional branches of one business each getting a site only splits search, duplicates news, and mismatches phones.
Permissions need design too. Can a subsidiary edit products but not group news? Does brand or HQ legal update franchise policy? That decides how the CMS splits, not how designers split. Agree search landing: group name, brand name, product name — avoid fighting titles. See search compounding. If only the HQ portal is bilingual and product sites stay Chinese, overseas buyers still cannot enter. See whether you need bilingual pages.
DaXi lists brands, legal entities, and who updates before choosing architecture, and writes how 301s and ICP filing are handled. Go to the corporate website service page or see From Brief to Launch.
Also keep this in mind
IR, hiring, party work, or compliance that must exist belongs on the portal. Do not pollute the brand product site’s inquiry path. Two goals on one home page fail both. Short path on the brand site, full verification on the group site — the more stable split.
An expired cert on a subsite hurts the group portal. One takedown rule is safer than every unit for itself. The portal can list certs. Downloads still point at the entity’s own site.
When two group sites fight on the same product name, name a canonical page. Evaluators will otherwise not know which entity to trust.
When a brand shuts or merges, archive the site. Do not 404. Old bid-file links should still reach a page that says who continues the work.