Meeting a specification is not the same as holding an approval
Look at any Chinese lubricant price list and you will see API, ACEA, ILSAC and a row of car-maker names. Most of the time nobody is trying to deceive you. But the label going on those drums has your brand on it, not the supplier's, and in your market you are the one who answers for what it says.
The distinction, in one paragraph
A specification is a published set of performance requirements. Any formulator can design against it and test against it, and saying so is a factual statement about what the product targets. An approval or a licence is a separate thing: a body such as API, or a vehicle manufacturer, has run its own process and granted permission to make the claim, usually against a licence number, a fee and an audit.
The first is engineering. The second is permission. They are written almost identically on a price list and they are not remotely the same.
Why this lands on you, not on your supplier
If a drum in your warehouse carries a mark the programme has not licensed, the problem is in your market, with your customer, under your brand. Your supplier is in another jurisdiction. Whatever the contract says, you are the one having the conversation.
This is also why we write our own documentation the way we do: specification references on this site and in our data sheets are stated as performance targets and product types, not as approvals. That is a less impressive sentence than the alternative. It is the one we can stand behind.
What to ask before you print anything
Two questions, both short. For any mark on the proposed label: is this an approval or a performance target? If it is an approval, what is the licence number and who holds it?
A supplier who answers plainly — including "that one is a target, not a licence" — is telling you something useful about the rest of their documentation. A supplier who treats the question as an insult is telling you something too.
What a data sheet can honestly carry
Viscosity grade, measured properties with the test method beside them, the specifications the product targets, recommended applications, pack sizes. That is a document a technical buyer in Germany or Chile can evaluate, and it is enough to win business on.
Safety data sheets are the other half and they are market-specific, which is why we prepare them per product and destination with the quotation rather than publishing a generic file. A generic SDS is worse than none: it looks compliant and is not.