There are a lot of companies using Spring, at least in Europe I can't count them. I don't know on what planet you're living :)
Don't know if there are any big IT companies in Europe.
No only spring but also java is a over-promoted product. Before being acquired by Orcale, Sun devoted much of its money to promote Java.
Amazon (significant amounts of the infrastructure run on Java, take a look at their jobs board: http://www.amazon.com/gp/jobs/ref=j_sq_btn?jobSearchKeywords...)
Google (http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Google-prefer-the-Java-stack-f...)
Twitter (They started out entirely Ruby, but converted pretty much their entire stack to the JVM through use of Java and Scala, due to scaling issues http://www.wired.com/2013/09/the-second-coming-of-java/)
LinkedIn (https://engineering.linkedin.com/play/play-framework-linkedi...)
Yahoo
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=grad&req=a0... https://www.facebook.com/careers/department?dept=grad&req=a0...)
Salesforce (http://salesforce.careermount.com/candidate/job_search/quick...)
The list just goes on and on. It's fast (okay maybe not as fast as carefully hand-rolled C++, but used the right way it can get near to it), has lots of mature tooling, and most importantly of all is absurdly stable.
If you're worried about start up time, you're likely worrying about the wrong thing. Amazon, for example, is well known to scale up and down their infrastructure on demand, and yet they're running on Java. They wouldn't do that if application start-up time was a problem.
It's rare to see java applications that take more than 5-10 seconds to start up unless they're insanely monolithic and pulling in large numbers of libraries (aka enterprise stacks like Websphere), and once they're running you leave them running. Java start up time should be the shortest part of the whole 'spin up a new instance and start handling requests'.