Valuation reflects market sentiment and potential but perhaps I should have left it out. The real focus is the "world-changing" aspect of the products produced.
What have been the recent global innovations produced by those German companies? Anything turned into a household name?
I'm actually not quite sure what you mean with the "global innovations" part, though, could you expand on that? What is it that makes e.g. Microsoft innovative?
What I see is the your big four all sell consumer product/ services and thus are more visible. E.G. Bosch is developing electric powertrain components, produces radar/lidar and video sensors for autonomous driving. Bosch also produces the robots used in those mostly-automated factories.
That's why they're called a "hidden champion".
We've had gyroscopes for a century. The iPhone is innovative because it used that to implement a new device that changed mobile computing.
German companies with more revenue than Amazon: Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW, Allianz, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Uniper, Bosch.
On the smaller end, Germany also has a comparable number of employer firms per capita as the U.S.
Empirically it largely is a myth that worker protection and consumer protection stiffles enterprises or innovation.