While Alcatel, Nokia, Ericsson, had to play by the rules of their countries (not bribing officials in foreign locations), Huawei was able to gobble up most of the bids across Asia and Africa. While the Western telco players were held accountable in their bidding process, Huawei managed to gain a competitive advantage by playing under a different set of rules.
For this reason it's impossible for any multinational to compete against Huawei while following the laws. (at least it was all the way until 2015 and by then the ship has sailed).
The idea that Huawei was just better at innovation etc isn't true either since how much of these (5G) patents came to be created is another horror story.
Eventually Huawei gobbled up all the R&D in France, Italy and Germany that previously belonged to us. Lot of people that got laid off from their previous employer simply switched to Huawei working on the same thing. You could work on cutting edge tech for Siemens in Milan one day, and a few months later worked for Huawei on the same topic.
In no other place was the IP theft so visible as in the ETSI standards workgroups (based in france). At ETSI workshops Huawei was "shining" with their active participation and with European based engineers from Italy, France, and Germany - while the other players were slowly dying and could barely afford sending people to these workshops or put them on full-time job for standards ... The reason they could do it is because they simply didn't have to play by the same rules as the rest of us.
the biggest criminals of course aren't Huawei execs but Telecom CxO's that knew how their companies got ripped off but still decided it was a great idea to create a site in China to off-shore some of the work. They sold out not just their companies in exchange for a fat bonus but an entire industry.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/siemens-chief-promises-full-explanatio...